Welcome to Wikimedia { An introduction to and Wikimedia Commons What is Wikimedia?

 Wikipedia – supported by the

 Mission: to empower and engage people around the world to collect, develop, and disseminate educational content under a free, open license

 Wikimedia Foundation does not manage content: all content managed by volunteer community

The Foundation also supports 12 sister projects Anyone is a Wikimedian!  Once logged in, open the Wikipedia homepage; click on today’s featured article

 In pairs, complete as many of the following in 5 minutes:

 Find the talk page

 Find the article’s edit history

 Find the category/categories this article is included in

 Add this article to your watchlist

 Find the other languages this article is written in

 Find the most recent contributor to this article

 Find that contributor’s list of contributions

 Find that contributor’s user page

Wikipedia: behind the scenes scavenger hunt But Wikipedia isn’t trustworthy! Actually, in a comparative study, key Wikipedia articles had an average of 4 errors each; compare to 3 for Encyclopaedia Britannica online Anyone can make up anything It’s very difficult to add false information to Wikipedia articles, You don’t know if it’s accurate especially larger, more active ones

There are many community- based assessments for article quality, and all this information is open and available Wikipedians aren’t experts, they’re all amateurs and teens Wikipedians are a very diverse bunch, and they’re all judged on the quality of their edits, not Misconceptions their background How to:  Create headers  Bold/italicise text  Bulleted/numbered lists  Link to internal articles  Link to external urls  Add a category  Reference

Editing: getting started  Click on your Userpage, then on ‘start this page’  Five minutes to write 2-3 lines about anything – use bold text, italics, 1 list, 2 header sizes  Add a internal Wikipedia link  Add an external link to a website  Add an in-line citation using the editing toolbar template  Add the category ‘Wikipedians in Scotland’  Before saving: always ‘preview changes’ and write an edit summary! Editing: taking the plunge  Keep a neutral point of view

 Verifiability: no original information

 Avoid conflicts of interest

 Remember: it’s an encyclopaedia

 Is this notable? Is it relevant?

 Assume good faith!

Writing on Wikipedia  Find any Wikipedia article with an image  Click on that image and find its image description page on Wikimedia Commons  What other articles has this image been used on?

 What information can you find out about this image?  Where can you find more like it?

Illustrating Wikipedia Available for use, reuse, or All content or Creative modification by anyone, for Commons licencing any purpose

Content can Nearly 24 be used on any million images, Wikimedia film, books, site, in any presentations, language, all audio files – all around the created and world maintained by volunteers

This is Wikimedia Commons  Anyone can add an image from Commons to Wikipedia

 Find ‘Category:Images uploaded as part of NLS-WMUK collaboration’

 Can you find a Wikipedia article related to one of the images?

 Is the image already there, or are there any images?

 If not: add the image!

 [[File:Example.jpg|thumb|Caption for image]]

Can you place an image?  Wikimedia websites have 500 million viewers per month

 Wikimedia sites have around 21 billion page views per month

 Wikipedia has 4.5 million articles in English

 There are more than 25 million articles in 285 other languages

 There is a community of thousands of editors actively working with content

 Responsible for 9m edits each month

supports initiatives to open up access for harder to reach groups: i.e.

So why use Wikimedia?  Added 1,100 images to Commons – nearly 10% in use on Wikipedia

 Supported 9 edit-a-thons

 Trained 75 new users, created 35 new articles and improved 34

 Views for NLS images on Wikipedia up by approx. 600,000 since May 2014

Wikimedia and the NLS

 Create an account

 Stay logged in

 Like an article or a topic? Add it to your watchlist!

 Check an interesting article’s talk page

 Spelling error? Fix it!

 Still nervous? You can suggest content or resources on an article’s talk page rather than adding it yourself

Tips for a gradual approach Go forth and prosper